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Femspec is an "interdisciplinary feminist journal dedicated to critical and creative works in the realms of sf, fantasy, magical realism, surrealism, myth, folklore and other supernatural genres."

Friday, March 21, 2014

The Great Age Issue: Reproductive Equality in Marge Piercy

“So We All Became Mothers”:

Reproductive Equality in Marge
Piercy

By Mala Ghoshal

One of the facets of science fiction
which is particularly valuable to feminism is its ability to conceptually
separate elements which are, in our society, nearly inextricably bound
together, in order to consider each element individually. An excellent case in
point is the distinction between sexual difference and reproductive difference.
This paper focuses on Marge Piercy’s novel Woman
on the Edge of Time, which preserves the existence of two sexes but does
away with the distinction between a birthing sex and a non-birthing sex.
Furthermore, Piercy argues that sexual difference in and of itself doesn’t
preclude the creation of an egalitarian society; reproductive difference, on
the other hand, must be surmounted before true equality can be achieved.

The story’s protagonist is
Connie, a poor institutionalized, Mexican-American woman, who is contacted by a
woman who lives in a community called Mattapoisett 150 years in the future. While Connie is increasingly impressed by
Mattapoisett’s tight-knit community, concern for individuals, lack of
hierarchy, and overflowing joy and creativity, she is initially horrified by
their system of reproduction and child rearing. Babies are brought to term in a
uterine replicator, and raised by a trio of co-mothers (who may be either male
or female, and who bear no genetic relation to the child). Connie protests,
“How can men be mothers! How can some kid who isn’t related to you be your
child?” (105). Luciente, her host in the future, responds,

It was part of women’s long
revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was
that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in relation
for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth.
Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we’d never be equal. And males
never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers.
(105)

Connie’s initial reaction to the Mattapoisett
version of maternity is resentful fury, colored by her memories of the child
who was taken away from her. She rages:

How could anyone know what being
a mother means who has never carried a child nine months heavy under her heart,
who has never born a baby in blood and pain, who has never suckled a child. Who
got that child out of the machine the way that couple, rich and white, got my
flesh and blood. All made up already, a canned child, just add money. What do
they know of motherhood? (106)

The mothers of Mattapoisett don’t
carry or bear their infants. Connie learns, to her increased outrage, that male
as well as female mothers suckle. She reacts to the sight of a man nursing
first with disgust, then with jealousy, and the with anger, reflecting:

[H]ow dare any man share that
pleasure. These women thought they had won, but they had abandoned to men the
last refuge of women. What was special about being a woman here? They had given
it all up, they had let men steal from them the last remnants of ancient power,
those sealed in blood and milk. (134)

The
point that Piercy leads us to see is that there is nothing special about being
a woman here – nor about being a man – nor does there need to be. Connie
gradually moves from revulsion to acceptance of Mattapoisett’s revisions of
biology. As she continues to watch the man nurse, she reflects that “[s]he
could almost hate him in the peaceful joy to which he had no natural right; she
could almost like him as he opened like a daisy to the baby’s sucking mouth”
(135).

Much of the impact of Connie’s
journey towards acceptance of Mattapoisett springs from its difficulty. By
presenting biological motherhood as overwhelmingly beautiful and powerful, and
then advancing arguments as to why aspects of it should be eliminated and other
aspects shared anyway, Piercy compels her readers to grapple with the question.

Connie finally realizes that she has
come to not only accept but also embrace Mattapoisett’s ways when she sees a
child who seems the double of her lost daughter:

Suddenly she assented with all
her soul to Angelina in Mattapoisett.… Yes, you can have my child, you can keep
my child…. She will be strong there, well fed, well housed, well taught, she
will grow up much better and stronger and smarter than I…. She will never be
broken as I was. She will be strange, but she will be glad and strong and she
will not be afraid. She will have enough. She will have pride. She will love
her own brown skin and be loved for her strength and her hard work. She will
walk in strength like a man and never sell her body and she will nurse babies
like a woman and live in love like a garden, like that children’s house of many
colors. People of the rainbow with its end fixed in the earth, I give her to
you! (141)

All of Mattapoisett’s citizens are
able to walk in strength like men and nurse babies like women; they are all
free from participation in certain aspects of maternity and free to participate
in other aspects of maternity. Thus, sexual differences lose meaning in the absence
of reproductive difference; gender roles are completely absent from
Mattapoisett, and Connie frequently has trouble distinguishing males from
females. Indeed, she believes that her Mattapoisett host, Luciente, is male for
the first sixty-seven pages of the book. When she realizes her error, her
reflections emphasize how gendered the most minute aspects of behavior are in
our society:

Luciente spoke, she moved with
that air of brisk unselfconscious authority Connie associated with men.
Luciente sat down, taking up more space than women ever did. She squatted, she
sprawled, she strolled, never thinking about her body was displayed. (67)

Because
we see Luciente through Connie’s eyes we also perceive her as male throughout
the beginning of the novel. The fact that we see her first as a man and then as
a woman contributes to Piercy’s successful depiction of Luciente as socially
androgynous, unbounded by gender roles or expectations.

Another remarkably effective
strategy of highlighting the centrality of sexual difference in our culture and
convincingly depicting a society where sexual difference just isn’t seen as
terribly relevant is Piercy’s use of gender-neutral pronoun, “per.” We never
learn the sex of many of the minor characters, and the sex of other characters
seems unimportant partly because it is not constantly emphasized in language.
Piercy’s creation of a completely gender-neutral language has the result that
her society is completely androgynous. Emerging from Woman on the Edge of Time, a reader returns with new eyes to a
language and a culture that suddenly seem saturated with markings of sexual
difference.

Piercy’s novel calls our attention
to our concepts of identity and bodily experience. The issue of connection
between mind and body, soul and flesh, occupies a pivotal place in both
philosophy and feminism. Historically, systems of thought which see the mind
and body as separate and separable have opposed the two in a hierarchical and
antagonistic relationship which privileges the mind over the body. In such
systems, the body has often been equated with women, nature, and racial others,
who need to be subdued and controlled by those who equate themselves with the
mind. Many feminists are understandably skeptical, then, of technologies which
seek to overcome nature and “free” people from the constraints of physicality.
Other feminists embrace the use of such technologies as a means of breaking
down the equation between women and the body.

Piercy embraces the use of
technology to eliminate reproductive difference. At first glance, Piercy’s
society, which entirely replaces natural birth with artificial birth, seems
more concerned with overcoming the constraints and discomforts of the flesh.
Her society also renders the physical markers of race and sex culturally
meaningless. Connie, a woman who experiences her race and sex as well as her
experience of pregnancy and childbirth as central to her identity, initially
reacts against these aspects of Mattapoisett: “She hated them, the bland
bottleborn monsters of the future, born without pain, multicolored like a
litter of puppies without the stigma of race and sex” (106).

Eventually, however, Connie and the
reader come to see the citizens of Mattapoisett as both deeply embodied and
cautious in their use of technology. Connie’s observation of a man experiencing
the sensual pleasure of nursing is one place where the embodied experience is
emphasized; when she asks Luciente why they don’t use formula, she responds,
“But the intimacy of it! We suspect loving and sensual enjoyment are rooted in
being held and suckling and cuddling” (135). Piercy’s novel reveals a closer
sense of identity between the body and the self and more comfort with less
pleasurable aspects of physicality. The citizens of Mattapoisett treat health
problems largely through “inknowing,” or biofeedback; inknowing is not seen as
a way of using the mind to control the body, but as a way of understanding the
unity of the two. Thus, Piercy’s novel celebrates bodies as they are, be that
fleshy, scarred, or aged. Surgical modification of the body appears only in the
brief vision of a dystopic future against which Mattapoisett is poised, in
which women are surgically “improved” to meet absurd standards of femininity
and men are melded with machines to create more efficient and obedient
soldiers.

Finally, Piercy’s society accepts
aging and death. When Connie asks Luciente why her society hasn’t solved these
problems, Luciente responds, “But Connie, some problems you solve only if you stop being human, become
metal, plastic, robot computer. Is dying itself a problem?” (125). Though
Piercy is concerned with minimizing the domination of nature by humans and
eliminating the domination of women by men, she is also concerned with
minimizing the domination of children by adults. Consequently, in Piercy’s
novel, the nuclear family has given way to trios of comothers who agree to
share the care of a child until age twelve or so. Comothers are generally not
lovers, “[s]o the child will not get caught in love misunderstandings” (74).
The notion of the nuclear family is further disrupted by living arrangements:
each adult lives in a spec of “per” own, the children all live together in a
children’s house, and all meals are communal. School has been replaced with learning
by doing, and children accompany adults whose work interests them. Connie notes
with surprise the fact that the community has the resources to provide children
with art supplies and tools and complex scientific equipment, but toys are
virtually absent. The explanation she
receives provides a thought-provoking perspective on the contemporary utility
of toys:

They play farming and cooking and
repair and fishing and driving and manufacture and plant breeding and baby
tending. When children aren’t kept out of the real work, they don’t have the
same need for imitation things…. In that time…they had many toys for teaching
sex roles to children. (138)

Along
with sex roles, taboos against children’s sexuality have vanished. While
touring the children’s house, Connie and her guides accidentally intrude on two
seven-year-olds attempting intercourse; her guides are startled and amused by
Connie demanding, “Aren’t you going to stop them?” (138). The relaxed attitude
of the citizens of Mattapoisett towards children’s sexual activity mirrors that
expressed in Theodore Sturgeon’s utopia Venus
Plus X: “Questions: When are they old enough to do it? Answer: When they
are old enough to do it” (145).

Even before puberty, then, children
in Mattapoisett are perceived as much more capable of engaging in “adult”
activities and decision-making than children in our society. Children do still
have a distinct status; but this status is formally removed following an
initiation ritual in which a child survives alone in the woods for a week, has
visions, and chooses a new name. At this point the child (usually about twelve
years old) returns to the community as a full adult. When Connie protests the
danger involved in leaving a child alone in the woods, a mother explains, “We
have found no way to break dependencies without some risk. What we can’t risk
is our people remaining stuck in old patterns – quarreling through what you
called adolescence” (116). The end of childhood is thus also the end of
motherhood. Upon a child’s return, per mothers are not permitted to speak to
per for three months: “Lest we forget we aren’t mothers anymore and person is
an equal member” (116).

Piercy explicitly states her
belief that children are capable of a much higher level of self-sufficiency and
autonomy than they are granted in our society: in the most explicit instance,
one of her characters tells Connie, “[Y]our young remained economically
dependent long after they were ready to work. We set our children free” (116).